Monk makes it happen out there
Ort: Toronto
We thought it couldn't be done. North York is now a hip place to be.
Go ahead. Choke on your lattes and clafouti croissant all you like, but curator/director Philip Monk -- for two years, now, the head of the Art Gallery of York University -- has pulled off the impossible.
This week, he unveiled the gallery's new digs in the Zeidler-designed Accolade East Building at York, right across from the Schulich Centre.
It's a space that he claims will be like no other space in the city; two big rooms, one slightly larger than the other, wired state-of-the-art to take on the most experimental program that the art world can dish up. [...]
Toronto's contemporary art lovers have been tracking Monk for a long time. Before York, he was curator at the Power Plant, where he excelled at making argumentative group exhibitions, often interpreting Toronto art in an international light, and drawing the emerging street-level artistic culture of the city into the sanctum of the white cube. Before that, he was curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, crafting tightly focused, scholarly exhibitions on established artists Liz Magor, Ian Carr-Harris, Ron Martin and Joyce Wieland, as well as maintaining a voice as an influential theorist and writer. (His section of the AGO's 1994 Michael Snow Retrospective, titled Around Wavelength, was the most electrifying Snow exhibition on record.) [...]
Responding to the snobbery about the gallery's northerly locale, Monk decided to turn a misperception to an advantage. "We've taken the idea of 'out there' as the conceptual model and applied it to all the social relations that are operative in the contemporary art gallery. Our response is: Yeah, we're out there. But we're going to be out there in every way." [...]
Because of the deal with the university, Monk needs only to raise money for programming, with exhibition sponsorships running in the $25,000-to-$50,000 range, but he has managed to pull a group of founding donors around him that has real heft and art-world expertise, including Toronto fundraising heavy lifters Carol and David Appel, Jay Smith and Laura Rapp, Sandra Simpson, Gilles and Julia Ouellette and Steven and Linda Latner.
The opening show of recent work by Fiona Tan sets the bar high in terms of international currency and artistic calibre. This will be Tan's first survey show in North America. The Amsterdam-based, Indonesian-born artist is a comer on the global circuit, usually working with film and photography drawn from ethnographic archives to produce her own moving-image pieces. Her work is often discussed as a critique of ethnography, but Monk is planning to take a new tack. [...]
Of course, Monk really won't know what he thinks about the work until he gets into the writing about it, which he plans to do once the show is up and running, in contravention of the traditional practice of preparing the catalogue for the exhibition opening. "The writing is a special adventure that I don't necessarily control," he says. It can go anywhere. [...]
Fiona Tan continues at the Art Gallery of York University until March 26. 4700 Keele St. in the North Ross Building, 416-736-5169.
We thought it couldn't be done. North York is now a hip place to be.
Go ahead. Choke on your lattes and clafouti croissant all you like, but curator/director Philip Monk -- for two years, now, the head of the Art Gallery of York University -- has pulled off the impossible.
This week, he unveiled the gallery's new digs in the Zeidler-designed Accolade East Building at York, right across from the Schulich Centre.
It's a space that he claims will be like no other space in the city; two big rooms, one slightly larger than the other, wired state-of-the-art to take on the most experimental program that the art world can dish up. [...]
Toronto's contemporary art lovers have been tracking Monk for a long time. Before York, he was curator at the Power Plant, where he excelled at making argumentative group exhibitions, often interpreting Toronto art in an international light, and drawing the emerging street-level artistic culture of the city into the sanctum of the white cube. Before that, he was curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, crafting tightly focused, scholarly exhibitions on established artists Liz Magor, Ian Carr-Harris, Ron Martin and Joyce Wieland, as well as maintaining a voice as an influential theorist and writer. (His section of the AGO's 1994 Michael Snow Retrospective, titled Around Wavelength, was the most electrifying Snow exhibition on record.) [...]
Responding to the snobbery about the gallery's northerly locale, Monk decided to turn a misperception to an advantage. "We've taken the idea of 'out there' as the conceptual model and applied it to all the social relations that are operative in the contemporary art gallery. Our response is: Yeah, we're out there. But we're going to be out there in every way." [...]
Because of the deal with the university, Monk needs only to raise money for programming, with exhibition sponsorships running in the $25,000-to-$50,000 range, but he has managed to pull a group of founding donors around him that has real heft and art-world expertise, including Toronto fundraising heavy lifters Carol and David Appel, Jay Smith and Laura Rapp, Sandra Simpson, Gilles and Julia Ouellette and Steven and Linda Latner.
The opening show of recent work by Fiona Tan sets the bar high in terms of international currency and artistic calibre. This will be Tan's first survey show in North America. The Amsterdam-based, Indonesian-born artist is a comer on the global circuit, usually working with film and photography drawn from ethnographic archives to produce her own moving-image pieces. Her work is often discussed as a critique of ethnography, but Monk is planning to take a new tack. [...]
Of course, Monk really won't know what he thinks about the work until he gets into the writing about it, which he plans to do once the show is up and running, in contravention of the traditional practice of preparing the catalogue for the exhibition opening. "The writing is a special adventure that I don't necessarily control," he says. It can go anywhere. [...]
Fiona Tan continues at the Art Gallery of York University until March 26. 4700 Keele St. in the North Ross Building, 416-736-5169.
von Sarah Milroy,
The Globe And Mail, 27. Januar 2006
Philip Monk ist ein langjähriger Partner des Goethe-Instituts Toronto.
Philip Monk ist ein langjähriger Partner des Goethe-Instituts Toronto.
info@toronto.goethe.org
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